With only the barest lip service to democratic values, Turkey has made
clear its opposition to international action in support of the
revolution in Libya. It used its effective veto to stifle discussions
within NATO and Erdoğan publicly and loudly criticized the unanimously
approved UN Security Council sanctions on Libya imposed on February 26.
It has made its continued opposition to international intervention
clear, arguing that sanctions will only bring more pain to the Libyan
people. To its credit, Turkey has indeed been at the forefront of sending humanitarian aid to Libya.

True, true, all true, both Fish and Ice make good points here, particularly with respect to the necessity of at least calling on Qaddafi to step down (something that Erdogan has now done).

But as far as the question of intervention is concerned: is it really necessary for Erdogan to be corrupt, or to only be interested in money or trade, in order to oppose NATO (or non-NATO) air strikes on Libya? Is it not possible that there might be other, less nefarious, reasons behind this opposition?

Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi may well be on his way out--but only if he can take some Jack Daniels with him

Awesome times here in the imperial metropole. On Saturday I tested out one of DC's Red Bikes, a public rental system of bicycles that is run by the municipality.

It isn't bad. There are bike stations, each holding several bikes, set up at metro stations around town. You have to buy a membership--lasting one day ($5), five day ($15), a month, or a year ($75)--before you can rent a bike, which is a bit of a drag. I bought a one-day membership at the bike station (anything more than five days you need to buy online). Together with the rental itself everything came out to about ten bucks.

Ibrahim Tatlises, a Turkish singer of Kurdish descent who has
millions of fans in Turkey and around the Middle East, was in critical
condition in an Istanbul hospital yesterday after being shot in the head
by unknown assailants.
Tatlises, 59, was shot as he left a television studio after
completing his regular show there around midnight on Sunday. Buket
Cakici, an assistant of the singer, was also hurt when at least two
people opened fire with automatic weapons and then sped away in a black
car.

Tatlises, of course, has long been rumored to be connected to various mafia-type elements in Turkey. I remember back in the 1990s there was a scandal when a dude Tatlises was with shot somebody after, it was alleged, Tatlises had told him to do it.

Unsurprisingly, speculation is that this was a hit related to organized crime. Here's what the National article sez:

Persistent reports in the Turkish media linking Tatlises to the
Turkish Mafia have been fuelled by the fact that prosecutors questioned
him in connection with investigations concerning several organised crime
groups, and there were at least two attempts to shoot him in the past.
He was injured in one shooting in 1990 and escaped unharmed in the
other, in 1998."Tatlises was the first one who carried the music and the lifestyle
of the south-east to Istanbul," Prof Karahasanoglu said, adding that in
the course of the singer's career, his business interests seem to have
taken priority over the musical side. Many people in Turkey knew that
Tatlises, whose name translates to "sweet voice", was reported to have
ties to criminals, but loved him anyway because of his music, she said.
The professor added Tatlises was not unlike Frank Sinatra in that
respect, because the American singer also combined musical stardom with
reported links to organised crime.There was intense media speculation about who may have been
behind the attack on Tatlises. Some news reports said Kurdish rebels may
have been responsible, but there was no indication as to why the rebels
would target Tatlises, and there was no official statement and no
reaction from the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, a rebel group
fighting for Kurdish self-rule since 1984. Izzet Yildizhan, a singer and a friend of Tatlises, told the CNN-Turk
news channel he suspected that Tatlises' business interests in Iraqi
Kurdistan, where the singer has been involved in a housing project with
Iraqi partners, were behind the attack. "All signs are pointing in that
direction," he said.

Ibrahim Tatlises during a moment of reflection

Tatlises is one of my favorite singers. Just last December I wrote a couple paragraphs about him, reminiscing over a concert of his I saw in Russia back when I was a graduate student. This is what I wrote back then:

While
I began admiring Ibrahim Tatlises' music early on in the 1990s, I
didn't see him in concert until he came to St. Petersburg, Russia in the
early winter months of 2004. I was over there doing dissertation
research, having fled the frozen temperatures of Kazan for the relative
warmth of the humid capital.
As part of the Fulbright grant I'd received, I was able to
spend up to $3000 for language study. This was a great opportunity: in
Kazan I read first printed, then various types of handwritten documents
written in Arabic-script Tatar from the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. In St. Petersburg, I worked with a Persianist from St.
Petersburg State University who was by nationality Azeri. She was the
chairwoman of the Azeri Society of St. Petersburg, and they were somehow
involved in the organization of the concert.
Ibo, as Ibrahim Tatlises is known, appeared in tandem with a
forgettable Azeri singer named "Azeri Kizi." Apparently she'd had a
couple of hits in Turkey.
Ibo completely undermined her. Apparently she hadn't been
singing, but rather was using a CD. Ibo, with a mischievous glance to
the audience, went over to a corner of the stage and started messing
with her CD, then announced "CD bozuldu" ("the CD is messed up"). He
went up to her and offered to sing a duet with her—one of her own
songs—but Azeri Kizi refused.
Ibo then came out and performed for three hours. No CDs were
used. A very hardworking man—he put on a hell of a show.

So yeah, he can be a jerk. And perhaps a killer in his own right, so...it's getting kind of difficult to feel bad for him, but still: he's a human being and a great artist.

And besides, all by himself Tatlises makes Turkey about 1.5% more fun to live in.

The
police seem to be making a big show of looking busy, as do the
politicians (see below for Gul and Erdogan's involvement in this story).

From the Bugle:

The Istanbul Police Directorate has assembled 10 police teams involving
30 policemen to investigate the attack, for which no motive has been
reported. As of Tuesday, police had questioned 110 people regarding the
incident.

It's a rainy Thursday morning here in the imperial metropole, and I have to head to the office! I love the fact that the name of the metro station near my workplace is "Metro Center," aka the center of the metropole, the center of the very center! It sounds a little like it could have been the subway station Winston Smith used on his way to work. But for me, it's just exciting. It's fun to walk out of that station and then down to Pennsylvania Avenue, and from there to the Reagan building. It's less fun to get the TSA treatment when I enter my building but still, I guess even that can be somewhat exciting.

It's fun taking the metro to work

Anyway, here's some news from the metro center, as well as from other parts of the world. In other words, it's your N & P:

Marcus writes that, on the one hand, we can't hold an entire community or faith responsible for acts that are carried on in its name, but that on the other hand we can't let political correctness prevent us from asking difficult questions.

But the unavoidable fact is that, however much violent terror
reflects a distortion of the tenets of Islam, it is not only practiced
by adherents of the religion but practiced in its name.

To ignore the religious nature of the terrorist threat is to succumb to politically correct delusion. To ignore the homegrown religious nature of the terrorist threat is to succumb even further.

As Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano testified
last month before the House Committee on Homeland Security, "One of the
most striking elements of today's threat picture is that plots to
attack America increasingly involve American residents and citizens."

Napolitano wasn't referring to right-wing militias or lone-wolf crazies.
She was talking about "terrorist groups inspired by al-Qaeda ideology."
And, she pointed out, "This threat of homegrown violent extremism
fundamentally changes who is most often in the best position to spot
terrorist activity, investigate and respond."

True enough. But there is a difference between investigating political radicalism and investigating an entire community. This difference is spelled out by Congressman Keith Ellison, who is quoted at the end of Marcus' column:

From the Borderlands Lodge...

I am an historian of the Turkic World with over 20 years of experience living in and writing about Turkey and the former USSR. My first impressions of the region came when I was working as an English teacher in Istanbul from 1992-1999. During these years I traveled extensively in the Balkans, Turkey, the former USSR, the Middle East and Asia, and studied Russian and Hungarian in addition to Turkish before returning to the US to pursue a graduate education.

After receiving an MA and PhD from Princeton and Brown universities, I held research fellowships with the NEH/American Research Institute in Turkey, the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. Since August of 2009 I have been a professor of Islamic World History at Montana State University in the cool little ski town of Bozeman, MT, holding the rank of associate professor since 2015. My first book, Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, was published by Oxford University Press in November of 2014.

I am spending the 2016-2017 academic year in Russia through the support of a Fulbright research scholar grant.

Find me on...

Turks Across Empires

Oxford University Press, 2014

Reviews of Turks Across Empires

"...path-breaking...Meyer demonstrates brilliantly the shifts in articulation of cultural and political identities as well as change of the specific vocabulary in the written texts of the Turkic intellectuals."--Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas

"...a skillfully crafted and soundly constructed account...Meyer's book is a page-turner, admittedly not a common trait in scholarly history works. It frequently turns into a sort of amusement park for historians, where the author parades so many newly unearthed, rich in detail, and immensely informative archival documents...finely tackles somewhat delicate yet thorny matters such as Turkism, Pan-Turkism, Ottomanism, and Islamism, as well as addresses the lives of humans who were doomed and perished or sometimes enriched and saved by those very same matters." --American Historical Review

"This thoroughly researched monograph offers a noteworthy caveat to the infatuation with 'identity' that for almost two decades characterized the post-Soviet scholarship on the non-Russian peoples of the Russian and Soviet empires...Meyer leaves us convinced that discourses and claims of identity need to be understood in relation to concrete power configurations and resulting opportunities, and not as articulations of perennial or even would-be nationhood." -- Russian Review

"James Meyer's Turks across Empires is a very valuable and intriguing reassessment of the origins of pan-Turkism through an in-depth examination of some of its leading figures...a great pleasure to read...Meyer's book is 'revisionist' in the sense that it successfully challenges many assumptions and arguments in the study of Russia's Muslims and pan-Turkism...provides a more complete, flesh-and-bone biographical reconstruction of these intellectuals and their milieu...the depiction of Kazan Tatars as 'insider Muslims' of Tsarist Russia is simply brilliant."--Turkish Review

"[Turks Across Empires] presents a wealth of information drawn from archives, periodical publications, memoirs, and other documentary evidence in the languages needed for such a study: Ottoman, Russian, Tatar, and the Turkic of Azerbaijan... As a result, Meyer’s narrative fills in gaps and makes connections that nicely complement the steadily expanding literature on the late Ottoman/late Romanov period and the Turks who shaped their own and wider Turkic identities in that era. By extension, the identity question has profound implications for twentieth and even twenty-first century intellectual and political trajectories."--Review of Middle East Studies

"Based on an impressive array of sources from Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan, James Meyer’s monograph not only expands the knowledge about the Muslims of Russia but also provides a widely applicable argument about instrumentalization of identity in different political contexts." --Council for European Studies

"James Meyer pursues an imaginative approach to the final decades of the Russian and Ottoman Empires by focusing on the biographies of three activists—a Crimean Tatar, an Azerbaijani, and a Volga Tatar—who, while born in Russia, were men with substantial interest and experi- ence traveling to and living in the empire’s southern neighbor. Biography becomes, thus, the modus operandi for unraveling the roles of these and similar men—“trans-imperial people,” as Meyer calls them—in propagating pan-Turkism and suggesting it as a new identity for Turks, who were also overwhelmingly Muslim, everywhere."--Slavic Review

"A major contribution of this work is its use of original source material in Turkish, Ottoman Turkish and Russian. Using personal correspondence and Ottoman and Russian tsarist era archives, Meyer traces four distinct periods to their trans-imperial existence moving back and forth between Istanbul, Kazan, Crimea, and Azerbaijan...an important contribution in several ways."--Turkish Area Studies Review

"…the book does a very good job in bringing the complexities ofRussia’s Muslim intellectual life of the late imperial period close to a readership broadly interested in the modernization of Russia’s peripheries and in Russian-Ottoman relations… Meyer convincingly demonstrates that since the 1870s Muslim communities in inner Russia perceived the state as a threat, especially in view of the administrative attempts at taking control over Muslim schools."--Journal of World History

"...impressive...James Meyer’s book is a collective biography of the most prominent pan-Turkists—Yusuf Akçura (1876–1935), Ahmet Ağaoğlu (1869–1939), and İsmail Gasprinskii (1851–1914)—by means of which the author reveals the patterns of migration from the Middle Volga, Southeast Caucasus, and Crimea to the Ottoman lands and back, as well as local politics in each protagonist’s original region…The fruit of this admirable exercise is most visible when Meyer demonstrates the simultaneous formation of population policy on both the Russian and Ottoman shores of the Black Sea."--Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

"Few Ottomanists understand the complexities of the situation of Muslims in the Russian Empire, while scholars of the Russian Empire have tended to imagine the Ottoman Empire only in broad brushstrokes. Meyer is one of a small new crop of scholars who possess the requisite skills…The narrative is richly documented and thick—perhaps the best account of Volga–Ural public life in English…" --International Journal of Middle East Studies

"Meyer, assistant professor of Islamic world history at Montana State University, draws from Turkish, Georgian, Azerbaijani, and Russian archives to bridge the gap between borderlands and peoples in this innovative study of the origins of pan-Turkism. Tautly argued and empirically grounded, the book highlights the diverse nature of identity formulation during the late imperial era, when the forces of modernity presented new challenges to traditional religious communities".--Canadian Slavonic Papers

"Turks Across Empires is deeply-researched, drawing on sources in Russian and multiple Turkic languages from no fewer than thirteen archives in the former Soviet Union and Turkey. This research is showcased beautifully in chapter one (‘Trans-Imperial People’), which is a superb, groundbreaking introduction to the large demographic of Muslims who — like Akcura, Gasprinskii and Agaoglu — moved between the Russian and Ottoman Empires"--Slavonic and East European Review